Sunday, May 8, 2011

Seventy-Four Today

It is the purest form of European adventuring. What's it all been for, the murdering seas, the gangrene winters and starving springs, our bone pursuit of the unfaithful, midnights of wrestling with the Beast, our sweat become ice and our tears pale flakes of snow, if not for such moments as this: the little converts flowing out of eye's field, so meek, so trusting - how shall any craw crunch in fear, any recreant cry be offered in the presence of our blade, our necessary blade?

- Gravity's Rainbow

Does Britannia, when it sleeps, dream? Is America her dream? -- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of mankind, seen, -- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true, -- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied back in, back to the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments, -- winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.

- Mason & Dixon

I restarted my restarting of my xth reading of Gravity three days ago (after stopping a couple of months ago because my brain wasn't right), found my paperback Mason & Dixon yesterday afternoon to reread book after next, and serendipitously rediscover today is Pynchon's 74th birthday.